Seal Team Flix: Breaking my Distaste for Dungeon Crawls

Game Information

Your soldier’s cover has been largely destroyed by those last shots. She stands up, alone, and needs to make her two shots count or they will be her last. The player assesses the situation and… rolls 11 dice to find out if that happened or not.

To my mind, the core achievement of Seal Team Flix is in modeling the tense and physical act of personal combat with a ludonarratively matching tense and physical mechanic. In so doing, the game put in stark contrast the mechanical issues I’ve had with dungeon crawls over the years: dungeon crawl is a genre that should be exciting in play but is, in practice, one of the most intensely calculated and elaborately strategic genres in existence. Adjusting modifiers and constantly minimizing risk every turn is the order of the day. That central conceit has never worked for me. That doesn’t mean the games are bad, but rather that the mismatch between theme and mechanics was off-putting to me. Even a widely praised innovator like Gloomhaven falls for it---if anything, it takes the genre into an even more puzzle-like direction: how should I order attack cards, when will I have resources for my attacks, how do they synergize, when do I pick up my discard? And even though many dungeon crawlers are known for their drama and uncertainty stemming from dice rolls, I’ve always felt that the risks represented by dice were still a distinct thematic mismatch since the final roll usually stems from an extremely carefully calculated optimization process.

By contrast, Seal Team Flix boils down the most important action, your character’s attack, into an intense moment of concentration paired with a physical action that can be short circuited by the player’s own tension and drama of the moment. The designers seem to understand this and streamlined most of the other parts of the game beyond the player’s actions and flicking. Although I have some issues with the rest of the game, this fundamentally makes the game worth playing for a wide audience. Anything else I say about the game pales in comparison to the game's central strength.

Beyond the immediate play, the game handles the meatier bits of a campaign style dungeon crawl in a way that makes it more thematic and interesting than a game like Catacombs. Seal Team never devolves into a war of attrition, ticking off hit points and adjusting modifiers due to equipment. There is impressive variety in the base box along with some clever game modeling decisions. In essence, equipment differences are represented by different sizes and numbers of discs being flicked or their effects, somewhat like the magic spells in Catacombs, but in ways that I consider far more creative. The sound, door, and cover systems provide a lot of avenues for unusual and innovative uses of the flicking mechanic. As an example, when your soldier fires a shotgun, you are allowed to fire through a door in front of you by stacking two discs on top of one another and, with luck, the top disc will travel over the cardboard door token and into the room to cause havoc. Similarly, the difference between a loud assault rifle firing three medium sized discs that blow up cover and stun enemies compared to a submachine gun firing lighter, smaller discs that do not affect cover became extremely telling when running through the campaign missions. Seal Team also carries flicking into game models of other activities, using sideboards for lockpicking, sniping and bomb defusing. The sideboards create the same sense of tension as the firing, though I found myself using these rarely enough that they were not quite as notable as they have been for other reviewers.

On the whole, the components are also a bright spot for the game, particularly for its low mass market price. While I’m indifferent to the theme, it fits right into a world dominated by modern special forces games in the digital space. The standups generally worked well and I had little trouble gluing and putting the boards together. The variety of environments and the idea of physically representing the tight spaces, corners, and rooms in real life environments in a non-miniatures game is still shocking and, from a gameplay perspective, had me actually considering the importance of corners and cover physically rather than mechanically, a fun twist. A physical issue with the game, however, is space. By representing doors, walls, cover, individuals in a non-abstracted fashion on a grid, it also meant that shots that would seem easy for my soldier became difficult for me simply due to the need to get my fingers into flicking position. I found myself taking “worse” shots due to extra room for my fingers, which significantly hurt the verisimilitude of the model. This is an intractable problem: ideally everything in the game would be scaled up to be twice as big, meaning your fingers would be trivially sized and shots would be easy to perform from all positions. But, of course, then the game wouldn’t fit on my shelves and would be some hilariously expensive niche Kickstarter.

Finally, unfortunately, Seal Team Flix does highlight some of the genre’s larger unsolved problems. The relatively tedious (and critical!) concept of Line of Sight remains, despite the flicked player shots, due to the AI enemy’s use of a simplified dice roll system for its own shots. Running the AI, too, is slightly tricky until mastered, putting it squarely in line with its co-op dungeon crawl peers. There are also some slightly unintuitive tactical consequences of the AI move, fire, and take cover system that you need to play several times to appreciate. In your first few games, you will likely be brutally flanked by enemies when you thought you were in good shape.

On the whole, Seal Team Flix is an innovative game with a shockingly low price that manages to salvage dungeon crawl games for me. I generally play the game solo---it is quite amenable to being played that way---and when I have a little time for setup it is an extremely welcome diversion. I look forward to any additional content for the game and suggest you take a look if you have found dungeon crawls wanting in the same ways that I do.

Your soldier’s cover has been largely destroyed by those last shots. She stands up, alone, and needs to make her two shots count or they will be her last. The player assesses the situation, gets their finger into position and carefully lines up the angles. It will take a precision shot that bounces off the wall to get around the corner and hit the enemy standee. You line up the shot, take a breath, flick the small blue disc… and misfire it straight into a nearby wall. Gulp.

Steve is an academic in Arizona and Texas that spends his off-time playing board games and hiking. He cut his teeth on wargames and ameritrash before later also developing an odd love of worker placement and heavier economic games. You can also find him on instagram at steve_boardgamesfeed.

GorillaGrody wrote: This is the game where you go around gunning down environmentalists, yeah? Kind of a turn-off for me.

They are really anti-humanists. I don’t think anyone would have understood if we had used that term, but I regret that “eco-terrorist” turned some people off.

I mean, it really sounds like a fun game. But in an age in which even moderate conservatives like Schwarzenegger are being called eco-terrorists (or even anti-humanists), it just sets off my dog-whistle alarm. In future, I'd recommend Nazis. Everyone wants to shoot a Nazi.

Like I said, modern military themes in a light game generally aren't at the top of my list for a lot of reasons, many of them political. It's a legit reason to be turned off if it doesn't work for you for whatever reason. That said, I didn't have too much trouble with it, the focus of the game is on a pretty interchangeable OpFor style besides some light interstitial stuff in the scenario book. There are only three types of enemy and they are very generic.

LJ nailed it. That’s the main reason I went with antihumanists. It started out as Islamofascists but I’m not keen on them nor was Zev so we decided to change.

Anyone reading page one of the manual has it laid out unequivocally, Gorilla. These are folks that are to the far left of VHEMT. They are a death cult who seeks to end human life on Earth to save the planet.

It’s funny to me that people with no idea what the game is about simply thinks “conservative dog whistle” when people seeking to be offended are the only ones who hear it clearly. This is maybe the third time I’ve heard this particular phrase used by people, and only one person has been like “fuck yeah, kill lefties” on BGG, and he was trounced

One of the designers is an environmentalist who has worked to reform e-waste recycling for 20 years or so, FWIW

I caught the whiff of compromise in the theme. I appreciate that you don't want to offend a billion people, (any particular billion) so you need to have an enemy that's way out beyond one of the fringes, and best if they don't actually exist. I think something like Hydra might have been a better concept, but I'm not the guy that produces hit board games.

Heck, Zev wouldn't even name real diseases in Pandemic. Presumably he didn't want to call out influenza or ebola in case there was a future epidemic that made the game look ill-topicked.

I think anyone concerned with the opponent can simply insert whomever they like. I think you could release this game multiple times a la the C&C system with different settings and eras, and really have quite a franchise. Nazis, Communists, Assyrians, Jesuits. Okay, maybe not Jesuits. But the English . . . hell yeah! Let's set it in 1774 and flick off Thrower's relatives!

My intention is to make this game a gift for several reasons -- 1) the new owner will be forced to play it with me in gratitude; 2) he has to assemble it; 3) he has to store it. It's really the perfect solution. But the more I hear from reviews like Gary's above the more I'd like to have this one to play with my boys on a snowy day. So I'm torn.

GorillaGrody wrote: This is the game where you go around gunning down environmentalists, yeah? Kind of a turn-off for me.

They are really anti-humanists. I don’t think anyone would have understood if we had used that term, but I regret that “eco-terrorist” turned some people off.

I mean, it really sounds like a fun game. But in an age in which even moderate conservatives like Schwarzenegger are being called eco-terrorists (or even anti-humanists), it just sets off my dog-whistle alarm. In future, I'd recommend Nazis. Everyone wants to shoot a Nazi.

If they're terrorists (and I believe that word was used rather than fanatics or protestors or ...) then I have no problems in ending them in all ways possible.

I am probably the most squeamish person around when it comes to military board game themes, and I initially thought that I would be put off by having to shoot at eco-terrorists (a.k.a. contemporary humans). However, when I actually played, it didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. They were fictional enough, and "evil" enough that I was able to rationalize it - also, other players humored me about not saying they were dead when we hit them, they were just "down".

ubarose wrote: I am probably the most squeamish person around when it comes to military board game themes, and I initially thought that I would be put off by having to shoot at eco-terrorists (a.k.a. contemporary humans). However, when I actually played, it didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. They were fictional enough, and "evil" enough that I was able to rationalize it - also, other players humored me about not saying they were dead when we hit them, they were just "down".

Sagrilarus wrote:
My intention is to make this game a gift for several reasons -- 1) the new owner will be forced to play it with me in gratitude; 2) he has to assemble it; 3) he has to store it. It's really the perfect solution. But the more I hear from reviews like Gary's above the more I'd like to have this one to play with my boys on a snowy day. So I'm torn.

I can't remember how old your boys are, but if KingPut, Strider and I had had STF when we were kids we would have played the crap out of it. And one of us would have probably have hidden it our suitcase to take it off to college.

Pete/Mark - online shops in the UK seem to have received a new batch of stock this week (my usual emailed me yesterday), has there been a new print run done or is this just the distributor spreading excess stock around the world ?

Hit the Wednesday FLGS night tonight and got in a game of Villainous with the new bad guys. I played Dr. Facilier, two new folks played Evil Queen and Hades, and one of the regulars played Maleficent....